Matthew A. Williams

Matthew Williams studied for his PhD in musicology at the University of Bristol as an award-holder of University of Bristol Alumni Funding. His thesis was titled: Sacred-Secular, Gospel-Pop Crossovers.

Matthew is especially interested in the field of popular music and religion, specifically utilising Peircean semiotic theory to study meaning in pop and gospel music. Matthew’s performance career strongly informs his research, having toured several countries professionally.

He has been an external tutor in music at the University of Oxford and has also worked as an assistant tutor at the University of Bristol. He has taught on a variety of undergraduate and MA courses and modules, including musicology, African American Music, Intertextuality and MA Black Humanities course.

He has a chapter on gospel-pop crossovers under contract with Routledge Press in a book entitled Black British Gospel Music from the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter, edited by Monique Ingalls, Dulcie Dixon-McKenzie and Pauline Muir.

He is currently working on a monograph related to his thesis topic.